beautful african nature

Valentine's Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of candy and cupids are actually dark, bloody — and a bit muddled. Enlarge this image Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit on women by, well, hitting them. Those Wild And Crazy Romans From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain. The Roman romantics "were drunk. They were naked," says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile. The brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the fes...

Three stories beneath the streets of Washington, DC, I stood on the bottom level of the  Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture  — for just a moment alone — as people flowed in all around me. In front of me stood a  stone block . Dating from the 19th century, the block, made of marble, once could be found in Hagerstown, Md. On it, enslaved people brought to the U.S. from Africa were sold at auction. Some moments before, I had viewed a piece of timber from the Portuguese slave ship  São José , which wrecked in 1794 while carrying 400 enslaved people en route from Mozambique to Brazil. Half of those people  died  as a result of the wreck. The Atlantic slave trade went on to become the world's largest  forced migration  of men and women by sea. In those purposefully "hushed, claustrophobic halls" — as  The Atlantic's  staff writer  Vann R. Newkirk II describes them  — I had also seen  i...